No Child Left Behind mandates may be unrealistic, board says

The No Child Left Behind program came into criticism from the board during a discussion of the district's performance on the Annual Yearly Progress Report. For several years the district has received an 'accredited with distinction award' for the district's efforts to educate Nevada area youth, however the school is in a Level I Improvement status based upon the district's student performance in communication arts and math on the MAP test.

For the purposes of the federal NCLB initiative goals for the numbers of students expected to score "proficient" in both communication arts and reading must increase each year until reaching 100 percent by the year 2014. Superintendent Dr. David Stephens said he didn't like the legislation and that his concern was how well the students did, not whether they met arbitrary and unrealistic goals.

"I could go on and on about No Child Left Behind and what my concerns are with it," Stephens said. "Basically, in a nutshell, is that it's bad legislation for kids. The reason for that is you look across the benchmark years and you see what the benchmarks are going up to 100 percent by 2014, that's just not realistic … My philosophy and this is what I communicate to the principals and what I want to communicate to the teachers is "If you disregard those yearly benchmarks and just look at how we've grown each year, that's what we look at." What matters is that every year we're getting closer and closer. On the state level we're performing with distinction and I think that's significant."

Nevada's total numbers met the goals set, however, two sub-groups, students eligible for free and reduced price lunch or students with Individualized Education Plans, did not meet the goals. Stephens said that more than 50 percent of Missouri schools were in the same category, and that number was expected to grow each year the NCLB requirements were raised.

Dr. Warren Lovinger was especially perplexed as to why such emphasis was placed on what, to him and several other board members, was a test that was used only to gauge how a district performed under NCLB when a different test, the ACT, was more important to the individual students future.

"There has, at least to my knowledge, maybe incorporated into English 4 but otherwise not much in the way of preparing kids for the ACT and ACT, not MAP is going to determine what they do," Lovinger said. If they're interested in college that's the most important test they take. If you were going to pick out something you were preparing these kids for, that's what it should be. I feel confident that if we took a more proactive role or approach to that, that you would see that go up."